Author: duane

What’s Your Status?

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Here’s something different. What exactly did class and status mean in Shakespeare’s time? Can we put it into a modern perspective?

Middling Culture has put together a status calculator to answer that question. You provide your answers for questions about your job, education, gender, and general position in the community (do you hold an office with the church?) Then it tells you how you would have fared back in Shakespeare’s day.

Elite Middling/New Gentry
You are of new gentry status! This means that you were born to a middling family, but you may have been granted a coat of arms in your lifetime, and that you became extraordinarily wealthy.

I think that’s good? Of course a number of the questions make no real modern sense (do you have a coat of arms? Were you gifted your accomodations by a wealthy noble?) so you’ll have to take some creative guesses. I actually ran through it twice and forgot what my first answers were.

They look very excited about the project, and there’s a number of requests for feedback as well as informative links about how the calculator works. I think it might be cool to see some of the answers side by side with your final result, you know? How much does gender play a role? What about the coat of arms, or your position in the church? Is there any individual answer that flips your status entirely?

Ethan Hawke on Shakespeare

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

I joke about the Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet (2000) because, honestly, I never finished it. Maybe I was going through a cynical phase at the time, but I remember listening to his rendition of “To be or not to be” in … was it a laundromat? And thinking, he’s just rambling through this, this isn’t any kind of delivery, I’m not enjoying this. I think Bill Murray was his Polonius, and honestly I don’t even remember anything about his performance. I heard it was actually good.

I guess it was a video store.

But I’m coming back around, and think I should give him another chance. The man’s clearly a fan of our favorite subject. He’s got a new novel out, A Bright Ray of Darkness, about an actor whose marriage fails just as he’s starting out a run in Henry IV on Broadway. Hawke himself was Hotspur in a Broadway Henry IV, and his marriage (to Uma Thurman) also failed, so this seems a bit autobiographical.

I love reading about people playing Shakespeare. That this one seems to hold a mirror up to nature so clearly makes me want to read it that much more. And maybe I’ll tune in to Hawke’s Hamlet again while I’m at it.

Exit Through The Gift Shop, Please

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The play never mentions a balcony, I’m just saying.

Although I once took a train through Verona, I’ve never gotten to see Juliet’s balcony for real. Given that it’s an entirely fictional tourist location, I’m not in any hurry.

But apparently three million people a year are, and it’s a real problem. The local government has been trying everything under the sun to control the crowds, including security guards, tickets and turnstiles. The area under the balcony, where the famous statue resides, is only about 400 square meters, but a thousand people at a time will cram into it for a chance to take their selfies and get to second base with the bronze thirteen year old.

The real problem, though, seems to be the museum. The shop proprietors are against any plan to limit the amount of traffic into the space – because only a small percentage of them ever buy anything. Three million people come to see it, less than three hundred thousand check out the museum.

She’s too young for you, bro.

So the next time you’re on Capulet turf, do everybody a favor and swing by the gift shop, why don’t you. Maybe pick up some post cards or a refrigerator magnet. Keep everybody happy. 🙂

Review: A Shakespeare Motley

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Somewhere in my collection I have one of those “Shakespeare A-Z” reference books that’s something of a mini encyclopedia, attempting to reference everything of note you might want to look up from Shakespeare’s works. So when I was offered a copy of A Shakespeare Motley, described as “from apothecary to zephyr, from bee to Yorick,” I assumed it would be similar.

It’s not. This “Illustrated Assortment” isn’t trying to be a reference work. Instead it’s exactly as the title says – more of a random collection of interesting entries, with pictures. M offers mermaid and moon, mulberry and music. U gives us unicorn, urchin and … urinal? Not a word I recognized from Shakespeare, but apparently he used it four times – three in Merry Wives, once in Two Gents.

It’s the illustrations that make the book, and I’ve included some random samples below. Many of my books aren’t what I consider “sit down and read cover to cover” books, they’re “open up at random and see if something catches your curiosity.” That’s exactly what this one is. I’d love to have books like this just lying around my house that guests would feel free to pick up and flip through, maybe learn something new, maybe get a whole conversation going about interesting bits of Shakespeare.

Of course every time I leave my Shakespeare books lying around the house my wife inevitably picks them up and puts them back on the shelf, but that’s a whole different story 🙂

I don’t understand why “biting my thumb” doesn’t feature on the hand page.
This picture of Queen Elizabeth makes me think it’s misprinted right on her face.
How much room did early doctors think twins had in there?!
I think unicorn is one of the highest quality pictures in the whole book.

I Don’t Know Who Zion Is, But I Approve

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One of the earliest posts I ever made on Shakespeare Geek was about an ad for a videogame that featured the Henry V “Band of Brothers” speech. The idea of spotting Shakespeare references in the wild, and sharing them, has always been a central theme for the site.

Just because I’ve gotten too old to understand the references doesn’t mean I plan on stopping any time soon. I get that “Jordans” are a type of basketball sneaker, I’m not that old. I just have no idea who this Zion Williamson character is. But not only does he have his own line of Jordans, he’s introducing them with Shakespeare.

I guess this guy is on the Pelicans? Here’s how much I know about basketball, I didn’t know that was a team. I’m deep in Celtics country. Which reminds me, apparently our new star is named Romeo. That’s surely got to come up again!